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In the aftermath of the Holocaust, Jewish historian Zosa Szajkowski stole tens of thousands of documents about Jews from French archives and sold them to libraries in the United States. To understand why he did it, Leff takes us into the “backstage” of the archives, and reveals the powerful ideological, economic and scientific forces that made Holocaust-era Jewish scholars care more deeply than ever before about preserving the remnants of their past.

Why did a small number of European statesmen take the world into the seminal catastrophe of the Great War? The German Chancellor Otto Bismarck had warned in 1880 that “some damned foolish thing in the Balkans” might lead to a terrible war. The shots at Sarajevo did just that a hundred years ago. What have we learned?

In The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book, Peter Finn and Petra Couvée bring readers intimately close to the charming, passionate, and complex artist that was Boris Pasternak. First to obtain CIA files providing concrete proof of the agency’s involvement, the authors give us a literary thriller that takes us back to a fascinating period of the Cold War—to a time when literature had the power to stir the world.

More than 100,000 children from both North and South Korea were orphaned during the Korean War. In 1953, the North Korean government dispatched 1,200 orphans to the People’s Republic of Poland to be educated at a boarding school transformed into an orphanage. The orphans were repatriated after six years, at the insistence of the North Korean government, as tensions between Pyongyang and its communist allies began to emerge. NKIDP Intern Intaek Hong examines the complicated process of how the orphans defined their identity based on their experience of interacting with their Polish teachers—who became like foster parents—and deploying their subjectivity in the process.

Drawing on a recently published larger volume - Strategies of Symbolic Nation-Building in Southeast Europe – Vjeran Pavlakovic will analyze the nation and state building strategies of the Croatian elite since the country attained independence, following the Homeland War, 1991-1995. In his presentation, Pavlakovic will focus on the role of contested narratives and commemorative practices related to the wars of the 20th century in the political arena. The discussion will also address current attitudes and sentiments in Croatia towards the EU, following the country’s accession to the European Union in July, 2013.

Starting in early 1915, the Ottoman Turks began deporting and killing hundreds of thousands of Armenians in the first major genocide of the twentieth century. By the end of the First World War, the number of Armenians in what would become Turkey had been reduced by ninety percent—more than a million people. A century later, the Armenian Genocide remains controversial but relatively unknown, overshadowed by later slaughters and the chasm separating Turkish and Armenian versions of events. In this definitive narrative history, Ronald Suny cuts through nationalist myths, propaganda, and denial to provide an unmatched account of when, how, and why the atrocities of 1915–1916 were committed.

In recent years Russia has shown a growing interest in East European far-right parties. Now Russia, as Political Capital Institute research demonstrates, is increasingly involving itself with far-right and far-left parties of Western Europe as well. At a time of political and economic crisis some European political forces have become particularly receptive to Russia’s new conservative, increasingly nationalist message. PCI Director Peter Kreko will discuss the changing perception of Russia on the political fringes of European politics and the new challenges it poses for Euro-Atlantic integration at both the national and the EU level.

Nearly seventy-five years after World War II, scholars hotly despite whether FDR was a hero of the Jews or a bystander or worse to the Nazi’s persecution and slaughter of Jews. In this talk Lichtman will draw upon the findings of his prize-winning book, FDR and the Jews (co-authored with Richard Breitman), to resolve the controversy. He will present a new portrait of a consummate politician— compassionate but also pragmatic—struggling with opposing priorities under perilous conditions.

In a sophisticated combination of quantitative research and two in-depth case studies, Larisa Deriglazova surveys armed conflicts post–World War II in which one power is much stronger than the other. She then focuses on the experiences of British decolonization after World War II and the United States in the 2003 Iraq war. Great Powers, Small Wars employs several large databases to identify basic characteristics and variables of wars between enemies of disproportionate power. Case studies examine the economics, domestic politics, and international factors that ultimately shaped military events more than military capacity and strategy.